Dear Glory,
Oh, your package came today and I had to write immediately. I adore your gift. Thank you ever so much. Good, strong fabric is hard to come by, and my pair of dungarees has just about disintegrated. You got the height right, but I’m going to take the waist in an inch or two. Turns out rationing is good for one thing besides feeding our troops—trimming my figure! I’m about the same size I was before I had Toby—imagine that! I can’t wait for Sal to see the newly svelte me.
I was delighted to hear about your philanthropy. The University of Iowa—I’m proud to say—has always allowed women to attend. In the first group of students, one-quarter were women. That was a century ago—do you feel the turmoil of the past few decades has made folks less open-minded? That’s certainly something to think about, and definitely something to fight against if the answer is yes.
Providing young women with opportunities is as wise an investment as putting your money in oil or automobiles. We don’t know what the world will be like after the effects of this war settle. Will Hitler have his New World Order? I don’t like to think so. However, the world will be a new place, with all the shifts and realignments that come with change. We best prepare all of our citizens for that.
I was fifteen when the first war ended. I don’t remember much about Armistice Day—my mother would not let me attend parades because she worried I’d catch the Spanish flu. I do have memories of my father saying he was glad he’d left Germany when he did, mostly because he understood the suffering that would befall the losers. (“To the victors goes the future,” he said, or something like that.) My pop was a conservative man, fairly risk-averse. We lived in a neighborhood we could afford surrounded by people who’d set up a small island of no-nonsense Germans in the middle of wild, lawless Chicago.
He called my mother his “Mäuschen” (little mouse). She did have a tiny frame and retiring demeanor, but also a tubercular cough, a sure hand in the kitchen and the kindest blue eyes I’d ever seen.
Occasionally she’d shave enough off the household budget to take me down to Marshall Fields & Co. for window-shopping and lunch at the Walnut Room. One day, a few months after the war ended, she told me to put on my best dress—we were headed downtown.
It was winter, but late in the season, when the sharpness in the air is replaced by the promise of spring. We strolled down State Street, arm in arm, and I remember thinking I was going to order the chicken pot pie, even though I always did.
But then we walked right past the department store. I tugged on my mother’s arm but she was surprisingly strong, pulling me over to where a policeman stood absentmindedly tapping his baton against his open palm.
“Sir, could you please tell me where I can find the Prison Special tour?” she asked in halting, overpolite English.
He leaned over her, I thought, because her voice barely rose above a whisper. Then I recognized the curl of his lip and the cruel gleam in his eye. It was the expression of a boy I knew at school who liked to push me in the mud.
“Go home, lady,” he said in a rough Irish brogue, poking at her shoulder with one thick finger. “Don’t be bringing your daughter to see those harlots.”
My mother turned seven different shades of red. “Come, Marguerite,” she said to me, and we wandered the streets of Chicago until we spotted a large, agitated crowd. Many had signs shouting “Votes for Women!” and “Suffrage Not Torture!”
A group of stern-faced women stood on a dais with a Prison Special banner flapping high above their heads. My mother fell into contemplative silence, so it was up to me to piece together what I was looking at. I stood very still and pitched forward, trying to hear every word.
After a while the circumstance became clear. These women had spent time in prison for exercising their first amendment rights. They’d been abused and humiliated. A few wore prison costumes—horribly rough calico dresses with rags pinned to the waist.
They exhibited more energy and passion than any women I’d ever met.
We listened, my mother and I, until the chilled earth seeped into our shoes and our cheeks stung with cold. When the speeches were done and the rally began to disperse, my mother placed one gloved hand on my arm, squeezing until I looked her in the eye.
“Sie sind nicht eine Maus,” she said.
You are not a mouse.
My mother would be so proud of what you are doing, Glory, as would your mother.
As am I.
Love,
Rita